gh an ever-increasing number of short
stories and novels deal with it. On the other hand, the plays through
which Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public in
England as Brieux is doing for the public in France, produce in the
spectators a disquieting sense that society is involved in
commercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing is
like the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troops
ready for action.

Some of the writers who are performing this valiant service are related
to those great artists who in every age enter into a long struggle with
existing social conditions, until after many years they change the
outlook upon life for at least a handful of their contemporaries. Their
readers find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a given
social wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy in regard
to it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it was
hidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal.

Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evil
are found in contemporary literature, for while the business of
literature is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for the
men and women now living that purification of the imagination and
intellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror.

Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned to
talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility
of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider
outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled
with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience
gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be
constrained to eradicate this ancient evil!

CHAPTER II

RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS

At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that,
first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called
white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure
their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and
prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and
illegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally
through the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of
the white slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we may
divide this legal acti